It was halfway through Mémoriale, Pierre Boulez's brief and luminescent chamber concerto for flute, that I noticed the rubber chicken hanging from a microphone next to Oliver Coates's cello.

The chicken, it turned out, did not belong to the cellist, but was part of the various Frank Zappa paraphernalia assembled for this celebration of the rock visionary's 70th birthday. The Sinfonietta performed Mémoriale alongside Varèse's Octandre, as these two composers were among the chief inspirations behind Zappa's expansive musical and artistic imagination. Led by Nicholas Collon, the performances were excellent, enhanced if anything by the informal setting and cabaret-style seating. But what of the results of these influences in Zappa's own music?

Revised Music for Low Budget Orchestra lurches between textures reminiscent of Debussy's string quartet and pure big-band glee. It unravels an anarchic joy centering on a wild solo, originally for electric guitar, but here transcribed for electric violin – doubled, in a stroke of brilliance, by trombone. It struck a nice anarchic counterpoint to the more minutely heard soundworld of Boulez.

The other piece was an arrangement of The Adventures of Greggery Peccary, Zappa's ironic epic about a wide-tie-wearing pig. Musically upbeat and swinging, the song works as a kind of hallucinogenic collage of advertising detritus (think Mad Men meets The Magic Roundabout), with the vocal, narrated by Mitch Benn with Tim Dickenson as Greggery, drawn from 1950s marketing diction.

In its way, and in its day, the song marked as profound a response to the bafflement and alienation of modernity as any other. But it feels dated beyond repair. Like the rubber chicken, one of Zappa's trademark "Anything Anytime Anyplace for No Reason At All" objects, its randomness lacks force in an age long since disenchanted with disenchantment.